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Things GDC 2009 taught us: Indie games aren't always cheap. During the "Braving the Stormy Waters of XBLA and PSN: Smaller is NOT Easier" panel, Jonathan Blow revealed that his critical hit, Braid, cost $200,000 to develop.

Blow admits that development cost cuts could have been made, but his spending was to ensure a quality product. To maintain a high level of quality, Blow hired an actual artist instead of attempting to draw himself. Another large chunk of the budget? Survival. "A lot of that money was spent because I didn't want to live in a shack somewhere," Blow told the audience. According to the creator, development only requires a few essentials: "a PC, a dev kit and enough money to live on for the time it takes to develop.

"If you can live for three years at your Mom's house, you can make a game for free," Blow joked. Wait... what'dja you say about our Mama?!

Ninja-spotted over on the official Game Developers Conference (GDC) website is a listing for one of the production track session that sorta spills the beans on what Bioware has up their sleeves for GDC.

Hosted by Biowares's own Dusty Everman and Project Manager Corey Andruko will be the session "The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware's MASS EFFECT 2." We don't believe that to be a typo, we think they really mean Mass Effect 2.

According to the description, the session will focus on the "Mass Effect team's new level-creation process" where attendees will "gain insight into some of the major issues the development team encountered while building Mass Effect at BioWare." Sounds pretty legit. You can bet Mass Effect 2 will be talked about, shown or completely revealed at this year's GDC.

The 2009 Game Developers Conference that's set to take place from March 23rd through the 27th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco is going to kick off with a KABOOM! That KABOOM will originate from one Peter Molyneux, Lionhead Studios' big cheese who'll be keynoting the conference during a session called "Lionhead Experiments Revealed."

Molyneux's keynote will be followed up with various learning sessions throughout the week, including sessions by developers from Harmonix, Ubisoft, Bungie, Epic and more. Remember too that last year's GDC brought us an official Gears of War 2 reveal, so it would be a fair assumption to believe Microsoft has some gaming goodies planned.